July 29 - August 11 2016

Mimi Gross | Marian Roth | Jicky Schnee | Bebe Beard | Mary Deangelis | Zehra Khan | Karen Cappotto

Opening Reception: Friday, July 29, 6-9 pm.

Mimi Gross

'Night Skies’; and more, ‘Looking up!’

“My work initiates with drawing, and for me drawing is an extension of my arm. I’m interested in what I see, surrounding atmospheres of everyday life, and the macroscopic worlds within mixed mediums, mixed scales, all are of interest.”

Mimi Gross is a painter, set and costume designer for dance, and maker of interior and exterior installations. She has had several international exhibitions, including work at the Salander O’ Reilly Galleries, and the Ruth Siegel Gallery, New York City, the Inax Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo, and Galerie Lara Vincey, Paris. She has also shown work at the Municipal Art Society and at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, New York. Her anatomically-themed artwork is on permanent display, courtesy the New York City Parks Department, at the Robert Venable Park, East New York.

Her work is included in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Brooklyn Museum, the Jewish Museum, le Musee des Art Decoratifs in Paris, the Nagoya Museum of Art, the Onasch Collection in Berlin and the Lannon Foundation, as well as the Fukuoko Bank in Japan and New York’s Bellevue Hospital.

Current exhibitions and lectures include: Brooklyn Museum, NY, “Macquette for Coney Island”(Stephen Powers, Coney Island is Still Dreamland); Brattleboro Museum of Art, Brattleboro, Vermont, “After Old Masters” (thru summer 2016), “Triumph of Pan, after Nicholas Poussin”; drawings in April 2016, “Brooklyn Rail”, Anne Waldman, visiting critic; lecture: “Evolving Collaborations”, “Sundays on Broadway” with Douglas Dunn, choreographer and dancer, May 22, 2016; set for “Solos”, Douglas Dunn studio, May 31-June 5, 2016; teaching: Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville,NY, Workshop with graduate theater students, April 2016; mural for University of Kentucky Medical School, summer 2016.

Gross has been the recipient of countless awards and grants including from the New York State Council on the Arts, twice from the National Endowment for Visual Arts, the American Academy & Institute of Arts and Letters, and a “Bessie” for sets and costumes.

She held the McMillan/Stewart Endowed Chair in Painting at the Maryland College of Art in 2010-2011, and has taught at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Penland School of Crafts, Syracuse University, SUNY Purchase, as well as other universities and educational institutions, giving workshops and advising students, as a visiting artist.

From 1960-1976 Gross collaborated with Red Grooms on many large, multidimensional installations, including the fabled “Ruckus Manhattan”. Since 1979, she has collaborated in a fruitful and on-going partnership with the dancer Douglas Dunn and his company, designing sets and costumes for his performances. She also collaborated with the poet Charles Bernstein. Her on-site drawings of the World Trade Center from 9/11 and after are included in the volume, “Some of These Daze”, published by Granary Books.

Marian Roth

Time and the Town

"Time and the Town is the title of a wonderful book about Provincetown written in 1942 by Mary Heaton Vorse. I have always loved this title because it comes close to summarizing a body of work I’ve created here over the last thirty years. My visual work, be it camera obscura or painting or lithography, has centered on my fascination with time. It is the same with Provincetown: a continuous fascination with the feelings of village, community, and incredible beauty. Even though the town has changed much in the 34 years since I came here, its landscape and seascape and art seem to embody and hold the past. The present and the past are woven into the fabric of life here. Looking at my own work, I can see both a feeling of joy and a sense of quiet melancholy or yearning. Like Chagall (an inspiration for some of the work in this exhibit), I find the joy of life, and the mysteries of time in the spirit of my village.”

Marian Roth, well known for her camera obscura imagery, is also a painter and printmaker. She received a Pollock Krasner grant this year and a Guggenheim in 2000. She has been awarded grants by the Mass Cultural Council and C-Scape. This past spring Marian received a medal for lifetime achievement in the arts from the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Her work has appeared in Eric Renner’s classic “Pinhole Photography”, in various magazines and journals, and a folio of her work was highlighted in “Adventures with Pinhole and Home-Made Cameras” by John Evans. Marian has exhibited internationally and taught widely.

Jicky Schnee

V.I.T.R.I.O.L.

“I have long been fascinated by fairy-tales and this winter read a book that analyzed the initiatory paths covered in them. In reading an old Russian fairy tale titled Vasalisa, the subject moves from novice to crone through a long series of tasks and hardships, some external, some self-imposed, but all requiring the use of intuition for progress. Vasalisa’s challenges include navigating the dark, facing the wild hag, allowing the too-good mother to die, and recasting the shadow of death. Having just recently had two daughters, this series is a reflection of my own initiation into and path through womanhood using intuition as my guide. This reminded me of the old Freemasons motto, V.I.T.R.I.O.L, visita interiora terrae, rectificandoque, invenies occultum lapidem, “visit the interior of the earth, and purifying it, you will find the hidden stone”; look within yourself for the truth which is already present through intuition. The definition of vitriol is a harsh or nasty criticism. I often find the cruelest I can be is to myself in response to my own (lack of) progress, which would be made far more quickly if, like Vasalisa, I used intuition.”

Jicky Schnee is an artist, actor and writer who lives between NYC and Woodstock, NY. She received her BA in Art and Art History from Rice University and completed her first solo show at the McDaris Gallery in Hudson, NY last summer. She has most recently appeared in the film The Immigrant alongside Joaquin Phoenix and Marion Cotillard. This is Schnee’s fourth year showing at AMP Gallery.

Bebe Beard

For Old Times Sake — Love You ‘Til The End Of Time

“I became fascinated with packing Styrofoam when I saw first-hand how it deteriorates into ever smaller particles around the edges of a fishing village in Maine. Our desire for the pastoral is so at odds with our actual built environment. For Old Times Sake hopes to frame the truth … for the moment.”

Bebe Beard earned her BFA in 1976, her MFA from Mass College of Art’s Studio for Interrelated Media in 1996. She has just received a significant New England Artists’ Trust grant as overseen by the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. Past grants include the Massachusetts Cultural Council, St Botolph’s Club Art Foundation and the Gottlieb Foundation Emergency Assistance. Beard has held residencies at Djerassi Resident Artists Program, MacDowell Colony and the Experimental Television Center in Owego, NY. She has exhibited in a wide variety of venues – alternative spaces, galleries, and theaters throughout New England and New York. Her most recent group exhibition was at Site: Brooklyn between Red Hook and Park Slope. Beard’s next upcoming solo show will be at Hallspace, Dorchester in Spring 2017.

Mary Deangelis

Portraits and Our Town

“I am a walker. In the winter the streets are quiet and sometimes it feels as if it is just me and the empty houses. This past winter I decided to draw one and then another and then I thought, “I’ll just do the 600 block”. Eventually I just kept heading west. I think of my drawings as portraits, and sometimes erase the plants or trees. I like to imagine what it looked like when the house was built, or floated and plopped down along the “front street”.”

Mary Deangelis’ paintings and drawings are delicate and intuitive, and have their own primitive organic language. Her focus on the small things, that may perhaps go unnoticed, is somehow always just enough. A drawing of a skirt on a hanger, or the portrait of a chair signals the possibility and breadth of a single life. In that vein, a rendering of one house seems to convey the life of an entire community.

Zehra Khan

Charm

“I create sculpture and installations out of paper and cardboard, favoring low-tech materials and practices. With simple paper constructions, I look to transmute the personal into the universal.

My great-great-grandmother was a prolific quilter in pioneer Idaho. Charm quilts are made up of repetitive shapes where every piece of patchwork comes from a different fabric. I loved how quilters use recycled materials from worn out clothing and fabric and may include trades from friends and family. I translated this quilting process into making paper quilts out of my old paintings, doodles, elementary school homework, photographs, and exhibition postcards.”

Zehra Khan is a multi-disciplinary artist. When she's not drawing, she may be making sculptures, costumes, masks, installations, performances or films.

Process is key. With simple paper constructions and ritualized body painting, she transmutes the human to the animal. In films, collage, and prints, the transformed protagonists cavort and play with cathartic freedom.

A Pakistani-American born in Indonesia, Zehra lived in France and Switzerland before moving to the United States for high school. She attended Skidmore College and received a Master of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Zehra is current participant in the NYC Drawing Center Viewing Program and the deCordova Museum’s Corporate Lending Program. She has attended art residencies at Yaddo, the Contemporary Artists Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and ArtLab at the Mountain Lake Biological Station through the University of Virginia. In 2012 she was artist-in-residence for the Cape Cod National Seashore C-Scape Dune Shack and was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Drawing. She co-authored a children’s book “A Sunny Day for Flowers”, published by Soberscove Press in 2013.

Karen Cappotto

In My Own Defense

“Whenever I see a chair abandoned on the curbside, I am reminded of one particular scene in the ‘70s comedy “The Jerk”: Steve Martin grabs an item that he absolutely must have before he walks out the door, and says: “All I need is this chair...”

I frequently see them discarded and up for the taking. Whether it is a generic office seat haphazardly held together by strips of black tape or an exquisite abandoned Bentley rocker, they are equally odd and interesting.

I have come to find that these chairs, that I find so visually alluring in turn hold a meta-language for abandonment, displacement, transition; it is tossed by society into a social bin, and in the midst of our accelerated gentrification, now only a very few have a seat at the proverbial table. This can and does have lasting implications. Perhaps these chairs I find on the side of the road are a call to consider the preservation of a habitat that has always thrived on diversity.”

Karen Cappotto is inspired by evidence of the handmade in a world where technology prevails. She is known for her distinct way of combining vintage materials. Her collage works are, in part, a meditation on the tension between the artisanal and earlier articulations of mass production. Using a palette comprised of vintage periodicals, maps, ledgers, and antique papers, she recalibrates and reframes the sites of a previous authorship into a newly imagined terrain. Karen studied at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown MA, Boston College, and Manchester College at Oxford University.

Cappotto’s work is in various museum and collections, and she has received multiple awards for her mixed media constructions. One of her collage pieces, “kitchen sink drama” was awarded joint first prize in the 2010 International Picture Works Competition, the prize also including a national poster/postcard blitz worth over 25,000 euros. She has also been included in the Land and Sea Contemporary Artists, by Deborah Forman published Spring 2013. Cappotto exhibits regularly in Ireland (where she also resides), Palm Beach, and Charlotte, NC. Karen also completed a six-week residency at the Vermont Studio Center.